Page 60 of Swerve
In fact, awareness began to happen their very first night home together.
They had finally fallen asleep in each other’s arms sometime after two a.m. Mariah had made good on her promise, bringing his tired body to life twice before exhaustion had claimed them both.
The nightmare came at its usual time, two hours or so after falling asleep. He woke Mariah before the dream woke him. She shook him gently, saying his name over and over again until he rose from the depths of the nightmare, tears streaming down his face.
“Baby,” she said, fear in her voice. “What is it? You’re having a dream. I’m right here.” She slipped her arms behind him and pulled him to her, cradling his head against her chest. She began to cry. “Tell me. What happened?”
It was a long time before he could speak. When he finally did, his voice did not sound familiar to him. More like that of a man he might have met a few times but didn’t really know.
“In one year, our unit found more than six thousand IEDs. Over two hundred men injured. Thirty-six killed. Five of them died right beside me.” Once he started talking, he couldn’t stop. “And every time, I watched a life combust before my eyes. Not just the life of that soldier, but the lives of all the people who loved him. And every time, I did what I had to do. Get him to safety as fast as we could. Even if it was too late, it seemed like we owed that soldier whatever dignity we could give him. And then we had to go back to being the soldiers we’d been trained to be, blanking out what we’d seen, telling ourselves it couldn’t happen again, that it was a fluke. But it wasn’t, and it did. Over and over again.”
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, hugged him as tight as she could, as if she could bring him back, hold him together. And he let her. He wanted the comfort, needed the solace, desperately craved feeling normal again. Feeling something. Anything. But the only time he didn’t feel numb was in the dreams. And what he felt there was terror.
“It’s not human,” she said next to his ear. “You were sent there to make a difference for our country, for our world. And you were tested to every extreme limit imaginable to make sure you could handle it, that you would be able to face those situations and do what needed to be done. And I know you did. But what about what happens afterwards? Does anyone prepare you for what it’s like to see that kind of horror? For how it will change you?”
She leaned back and looked at him, her voice rising when she added, “My God. What can I do? How can I help?”
He leaned against the headboard of the bed, pulled her into the curve of his arm, maybe to offer her comfort, maybe to prevent her from seeing in his face what he was struggling to hide. Because she was right. He wasn’t handling it. He felt as if someone had planted him in quicksand, and his boots were getting heavier and heavier, sucking him down inch by inch, pressing the air from his lungs.
He kissed his wife’s hair, wished he could tell her everything would be all right. But for the first time in his life, a life he had defined by his own ability to fight his way forward regardless of the obstacles thrown in front of him, he wasn’t sure that it would be.
~
THEY BOTH TRIED.
But the man Mariah had married was not the same man who came home to her from Afghanistan.
With every passing day, Knox watched the growing awareness of this reflected in his wife’s eyes. He saw her joy in having him home fade to alarm over the fact that for the first time since she had known him, he was sleeping in. Getting up at eleven or later when he’d always been up with the sun, getting a run in before breakfast. But he wasn’t able to go to sleep at night because he dreaded the dreams waiting for him there, and so he couldn’t fall asleep until exhaustion pulled him under, even without his acquiescence.
Mariah planned things she thought he would like doing, things they had once enjoyed doing together. Hikes. Long bike rides. Movies.
But he felt like a voyeur in his own life, like his soul had been removed, and he could only view the life going on around him as a bystander.
Mariah’s patience knew no boundaries. And so he hated himself all the more for his growing resentment of her attempts to pull him back into their marriage, their life together. Fair or not, her insistence on making him happy again made him realize she would never understand what it was he’d witnessed in Afghanistan or how it had changed him.
How could she?
It wasn’t fair to expect that she ever could. He knew now that he had deliberately set fire to his marriage, presented his wife with a reality that she couldn’t possibly choose to live with.
When she left him, it wasn’t a surprise.
But it was a relief.
Because then, he no longer had to try at all. He moved to an apartment and shut the door on everything that had once made him get up in the mornings. And for months, he barely left the place, only going out to get food when he remembered to eat.
One afternoon, he was sitting in front of his TV, staring at a talking head on CNN questioning America’s role in the Middle East. He wondered if this was how it was for the men who returned from Vietnam to discover that the country that had sent them to fight a battle it declared worthy of so many lives had changed its mind somewhere along the way. Those soldiers had not returned home as heroes but as villains, as if they were somehow suddenly to blame for the tragedy of Vietnam.
His phone pinged. He glanced at the screen and saw the group text from Ace Conrad, a former SEAL team member. He picked up the phone and read the message.
Hey, guys. Really sorry for letting you all down. The only easy day was yesterday.
Knox read the words again, his heart dropping to his stomach.
Instantly, he knew what they meant. He dialed the number, listened to it ring and ring. As soon as voicemail picked up, he dialed again. Over and over, but there was no answer. And he knew it was too late.
He sat there on his sofa, staring at the phone screen, suddenly aware of the pull inside him, the awareness that he could take the same out. He didn’t even blame Ace. He knew the why. The pain in his head that never stopped, no matter what medicine or alcohol he threw at it.
He understood what Ace had just freed himself from.
